In the common words we use every day, souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the couriers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty. —Owen Barfield, author (1898-1997)

Your
question reminded me of a morning many years ago, when we first
started homeschooling. My younger kids were little, and my oldest was
about 7, and we were looking through the dictionary to get a good
definition of courage.

The etymology of the word was there, part of which is "couer" (heart
in French)...I said "Look at this. Couer means heart in French. Couer
> courage...so where does courage come from?"

With her eyes bright, and a sort of "aha!" look on her face, my
darling daughter said "From France!"

blessings, HeidiC

NEW Etymology

List of Eponyms"An eponym is a person (real or fictitious) whose name has become identified with a particular object or activity."

Much etymology is prehistoric, but some new words and phrases have come along within living memory.

a riff from a discussion on reading, by a skeptical curriculum-using mom
who wrote:Reading is a code that needs to be decifered.

I/Sandra responded:

Yes.
And only the reader can decipher it.

Does spelling matter? Would word history help?

Cipher is from the Arabic word for zero, and has been in English for a long, long time. "To cipher," meaning to do arithmetic, is a word even my grandfather used, who was born in 1898 and lived in Texas. But why a "ph" and not an "f"? Because it came through Greek. Some Greek mathematician discovered the idea from Arabic, wrote it down in Greek, and it came to other European languages from that. "Ph" words in English are always from Greek.

To decipher something (like reading) means to figure out the patterns.

A parent cannot decipher words for a child. Only the child can decipher written language. You can help! You can help LOTS of ways. One way would be to gain an interest in the words you use yourself, and stop once in a while to examine one, its history, why it means what it means.

Holly wrote before she could read too, and she cared about spellings and the easiest way to explain to her why some spellings seem screwy was to tell her WHY they were that way. "Two," for example, has a "w" because it was long pronounced. Still old folks in Scotland and ballad lyrics will sometimes have "twa" and those who like Shakespeare will know "in twain" (as Gertrude's heart is broken, for example, or rather cleft--a little rougher than just broken, and related to "cliff").

Other "two" words where the "tw" sound remains include

twins
twine
between (in the middle of two)
twixt (same meaning)
twenty
twelve (OLD word we can't take down into parts anymore, but two-and-ten, somehow, since before English was even a language)
twilight (two lights)

Playing with words makes them come to life.

The history of England, of math, of writing, of counting... all clued above and in all the histories of words. Any portal into the universe is as real as any other. If an interest in language or butterflies or patterns or water creates connections for that person to anything else in the world, that can lead to EVERYTHING else in the world.

A parent cannot decipher the whole world for her child, but she can help him begin to decipher it.

THE DAYS OF THE WEEK

By Gunnora, the Viking Answer Lady. (A popular SCA source of historical trivia.)

Since Western Europe all originally derived
from Indo-European tribes, we find that there
were a lot of correspondences between the
various branches - not exact, one-for-one
identity, but concepts are clearly related.
So it's no real surprise to find that the
naming and symbolism of the days of the
week, and the number of days in a week,
might be pretty much the same in all
the descendants of the Indo-Europeans.

You can see the day-name correspondences
in other languages that descend from Indo-European:

Gaelic: Di-luain (moon day); Di-máirt (Mars's day); Di-ciaduinn or
Di-ciadaoin (day of the first fast of the week - Friday being the
second
fast); Diardaoin (the day between the two fasts of Wednesday and
Friday);
Di-haoine or Dia-aoine (day of the fast) Di-sathuirn (Saturn day);
Di-dómhnuich (Lord's day)

Irish: Dé Luan (moon/Luna day); Dé Mairt (Mars' day); Dé Céadaoin
(day of
the first fast of the week); Déardaoin; Dé h-Aoine (the day between
the two
fasts of Wednesday and Friday); Dé Sathairn (Saturn's day); Dé
Domhnaigh
(Lord's day)

The Germanic languages, however, are also related. Ares/Mars was
equated
with Tyr as a warrior god. Zeus/Jupiter was equated with Thórr as the
god
who hurled lightnings. Mercury was equated with Ódinn, since both had
a role
as psychompomps, the one who leads the dead to their afterlife.
Aphrodite/Venus was equated with Frigga and Freyja.

My mom chanced to
explain spelling in a way that made sense to me with the concept of the
Latin roots for many English words... literally one conversation.

I've always done that with my kids, about spelling, because it's a big interest of mine. And it's pretty easy with the Latin/Romance-based languages (words from French, Spanish, Italian or Latin itself, and for those who are starting to glaze over already, some of you might not've known that the root of the term "Romance language" is "ROMAN"—meaning from Latin, again).

So when Holly was grumpy that "two" had a "w" in it, I told her that used to be pronounced. I know a few of ballads with "twa" in it, pronounced "twa," and sang her a few snatches of one of those, and told her it survives in "twice" and "twins."

That was all. Short but memorable.

English used to have a hoiky noise, softer than German's, but English has the same great-grandaddy language as German. There were Germanic tribes that kept moving East and crowding the natives of the British Isles further East and North. The Norse (whose language hadn't yet split into several and is also a branch of that Germanic language) were crowding them down from the Northeast. So the Welsh and Irish and Scots end up on the edges and in the corners, where they ran out of land to move to. So that's why English has words that look like through and trough and plough and cough, because the gh indicates sounds people gradually quit making. But by keeping the spelling, we can tell "threw" from "through" when we're reading, and English novels from American (if they're writing about plowing).

Words spelled with a k are generally from Norse, like skillful skiing. Words with a k sound spelled with a "ch" (Christmas choruses and chiropractors) are from Greek, or built of Greek parts.

So all that can be frustrating, but it can also make English kind of like an attic full of the coolest antiques, right in your own head.

Apologies to those who might feel about this the way I felt the other night when I asked Keith to help me figure something out and he stood up and headed for the desk saying, "Let me write you out a simple formula." I got tears in my eyes and said, "NO! Just tell me how to do it on the calculator." There are no simple formulas** for me. So I totally understand if someone wants to say "NO HISTORY, just spell it for me."

Sandra

**—but I can spell formulae and discuss why it's not used as much now and that it really should be formulæ which is hard to put through e-mail and represents a once-common letter called an ash but it was once spelled æsc and is still used in some languages, and survives for Brits and for anal Americans in words like archæology and encyclopædia. And on the door at Raley's where Marty works, someone getting artsy with a computer font used that letter as an X in EXIT, so in roundy cursive-looking letters on the doors it says "eæit" and it bugs me. Is this as horrible as a discussion of calculus to some people? (They probably stopped reading up around "hoiky.")